Wise words on home brewing

By Phil Mellows

Home brewers are the quiet heroes of craft beer, tinkering away in their kitchens and garages, devising new recipes, the experimental cutting-edge. 

Very few of them will make it commercially, it’s true. But those that have are now populating the railway arches and industrial estates with some of the most exciting breweries on the scene. 

One of them is Jaega Wise, head brewer at Walthamstow’s Wild Card Brewery and presenter on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme.  

Her affection for her home-brewing roots comes through clearly in Beer Masters, the brewer’s Masterchef , which she hosted with James Blunt at the end of last year, and is still available to watch on Amazon Prime, and again in her first book, Wild Brews, coming soon. 

Published by Octopus, Wild Brews explains the science behind wild-fermented beers, and shares recipes with amateurs for styles including Berliner weisse, gose, lambics and farmhouse ales. 

There are an awful lot of beer books out there, but it isn’t often that beer gets its own television show. Leaving aside, like that slightly off pint you can’t bring yourself to take back to the bar, Neil Morrissey and Richard Fox’s serialised attempt to launch their own pub and brewery, you’ve got to go right the way back to the 1980s and journalist Michael Jackson’s The Beer Hunter to find serious beer telly. 

But then came Beer Masters, in which five pairs of home brewers from five different European countries are set challenges across five episodes to find a winning brew that’s good enough to be sold commercially. 

While Blunt, who these days runs his own pub in Chelsea, bought from the proceeds of his hit, plays the almost-average beer drinker with an amusing line in self-deprecation, Wise does the heavy lifting, calling out the off-flavours and off-styles as the contestants deliver their own take on brews from an easy-drinking pale to a Belgian tripel to a Pilsner. 

And it works. At least for anyone with an interest in beer, as you watch a group of actually quite advanced home brewers come up with some interesting recipes and the occasional car crash. 

Beer Masters, Wise hopes, will be a good thing for brewing, giving a wider audience an insight into the sheer variety and potential of beer. 

“For someone like me, it’s great to see beer on television. There’s a wide spectrum of what’s possible, and if people get that from the show, if they see that beer is so much more than a pint of lager, it will have achieved something. Though I do like a pint of lager,” she’s quick to point out. 

“The key thing for me is that as many people as possible are engaged. You certainly don’t have to be a brewer to like the show. I don’t bake but I’m really into Bake Off and watching them make complicated cakes. We want Beer Masters to be as accessible as possible – but we still want to find the best beer. 

“We gave the contestants realistic and relevant challenges. They aren’t easy styles to brew but we want to test them and find out which of them can thrive commercially. 

“In Europe, beer cultures can be very different within a short geographical distance, and it was lovely to see them exchange ideas and learn from each other. It was good, though, that they were also focused on classic styles – which are a real challenge in themselves.” 

She was impressed by the standard of all the brewers. “I’m an avid home brewer myself, and what I say to people who want to brew their own beer is make sure you’ve got the basics – and that’s really hard to do. 

“But the people on the show can really brew, and that’s what I loved about it. I was excited every week. There’s a lot of pressure on them, it’s really competitive. And all the finalists have the potential to be commercial brewers.” 

A week or so before the show was aired, I bumped into Wise at her brewery carrying out a last-minute fix to a new tank. It was gone 6pm on a Sunday night. So much for being a TV star.